One thing which has been alluded to briefly here on BusinessBlogConsulting.com in a couple previous posts is blog carnivals — a relatively untapped opportunity for blog marketing and link building.

It was fellow Business Blog Consulting contributor Toby Bloomberg who first turned me on to blog carnivals. For those who aren’t aware of what a blog carnival is, it is a traveling column on a particular subject matter that is passed on from blog to blog, each blogger selecting a topic in that subject matter and including relevant resources accompanied by their own commentary about those resources. For example, there might be a blog carnival on nonprofit marketing and indeed there is. The members of the blog carnival rotate in and out, kind of like a column rotates. Here is an example post from a nonprofit marketing blog carnival.

Why should you care about blog carnivals? In short, because it’s a great way to grow your link popularity and thus your search rankings, and because it’ll also gain you visibility in the blogosphere amongst bloggers. This can be accomplished in two ways:

1. First, by hosting a blog carnival, you garner links you wouldn’t otherwise have garnered from the other blog carnival hosts as well as other bloggers who follow that blog carnival (assuming of course your posts are of some value!).
2. Second, even if you don’t join a blog carnival, you can submit your own posts to the current host for consideration in the next carnival post. For instance, in the example carnival post above on nonprofit marketing (which focused on “Creating and developing online communities through Web 2.0”), imagine if you had written a post on “How Nonprofits Can Use MySpace” and then gotten that post included in that week’s edition of the carnival — and all it would have taken is reaching out to the host via email to get on their radar.

Check out BlogCarnival.com, a directory of blog carnivals, to see if a blog carnival already exists for your industry or topic of interest.

This might be a question just for us social media consultants, but I think it is more generally applicable: do we need to sign up for every new social network that comes along so that we can reserve our names thereon?

This came up because I just signed up and joined friendfeed.com (and yes, the obligatory link: You can find me on friendfeed.com as DaveTaylor) partially because I was curious about it, but also because I received email from a colleague that included the comment sign up now to get good user names.

But do we really need to do this?

What’s your opinion, fellow blog and social media consultant?

So first let me dispense with the obligatory acknowledgment that I’m sorry I haven’t blogged here in ages. I have wanted to often, but one thing and another…

On thing I’ve wanted to write about is Twitter. I’m hooked.  So far, I’ve seen precious few Tweets (as I gather its adherents call themselves) use it especially well for business communication. Mostly people complaining about being stuck in airports. Like the rest of us might find that interesting. One who does a good job keeping the posts interesting and on topic is Steve Rubel, not surprisingly.

Another shout out I’ve meant to give is the IAB’s new blog, the IABlog, under the stewardship of the IAB’s new, compelling leader, Randall Rothenberg, who also has his own blog. I’ve gotten to know Randall a bit in the past several months, and he’s a fun guy, a great intellect (excellent panel moderator), a strong leader for the IAB and really interested demonstrating the new directions of online media with initiatives like the IABlog.

When you click through to the blog, you’ll notice a photo of yours truly serenading the original IAB chairman Rich LeFurgy.  The uke is my new hobby for the past year-plus. Soon I’ll have to do a round-up of the many photos like this that already exist of me playing the uke at industry cocktail parties on blogs around the web.

The real point of this post, though, is that I’m currently at the IAB’s Annual Meeting, Ecosystem 2.0, in Phoenix, AZ. So far, it’s one of the most exciting conferences I’ve ever attended, really. Attendee list is who’s who of the industry. As I type this (blazing fast free wifi in the conference hall; see, they get it!), Randall is interviewing Susan Decker, president of Yahoo! and Jerry Yang, CEO/founder of Yahoo! You can see the other speakers yourself here, but they are consistent with these two.

Steve Rubel is here and we’re both giving running commentary on Twitter, plus the IABlog is providing updates, too. Keep your fingers crossed that they’ll post videos of the content. Wenda Millard’s speech last night, accepting the mantel as new chairperson of the IAB, was really great. I’ll post the link of the transcript or video if it’s made available.

Do you really need a process for starting a blog? Well, not if you’re a small, one-person business and you’re the only person to answer to. However, if yours is a multi-million (or billion) dollar enterprise that needs multiple layers of approval, then the following first in a three-part series on the process of setting up a corporate blog will benefit you.

This comes from a post at MarketingProfs, so here are the highlights. For the full post and original material, read on over here.

There are three phases to the corporate blog process. 1) Investigate, 2) Create, 3) Activate. This post deals only with the investgate phase, which follows these steps:
1. Determine Goals for Your Corporate Blog
You need to to determine why you’re doing this, get baseline measurements in place and create a vision for success. See the mindmap below for more detail.

2. Assess Your Market for Blog Viability
Not every company should blog. You need to understand what kind of conversation is taking place in your market and if you can easily enter the conversation with your blog strategy. You also need to look internally to make sure that this fits with your corporate culture.

3. Map to Overall Marketing/Communications Strategy
This is critical. The blog should not be an appendage or bolt-on to your marketing. If you’re going to do it right, it needs to be integrated into the rest of your messaging and conversation.

4. Risk Profile Assessment
Ask yourself a few questions to determine how ready you are to engage in the market conversation. You’ll have sooner or later, but here are a few things to look out for before you leap.
– Have you ever personally used social media and what’s your comfort level?
– What is your company’s tolerance for risk (e.g., initiating new or untested marketing tactics, launching bold corporate initiatives, etc.)?
– How does your company normally react to negative commentary from the media?

For more, read the MarketingProfs post: What’s the Process for Starting a Corporate Blog? How Long Does It Take? [Part 1 of 3].

One of the great things about using WordPress is that it automatically creates keyword-rich, spider-friendly URLs for your posts (as long as your Permalink settings in the Options tab of the WordPress admin are configured properly). Many times, though, these URLs are TOO keyword-rich. In other words, the URL has too many words in it. That happens if you create a long title to your post, because every word in the title is worked into the URL automatically by WordPress.

But how long is “too long” for a URL? For the answer to this question, I went to the source: Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. In my interview with Matt Cutts, I asked:

“What is excessive in the length of a keyword-rich URL? We have seen clients use keyword URLs that have 10 to 15 words strung together with hyphens; or blogs – we have seen them even longer there. A typical WordPress blog will use the title of the post as the post slug, unless you defined something different and you can just go on and on and on. Can you give any guidelines or recommendations in that regard?”

Matt answered:

“Certainly. If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: “How does this look to a regular user?â€? – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go and check that out.

So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users – and not have it come across as keyword stuffing.”

Based on this new information from Matt, you can see that even your blog post slugs have the potential to appear spammy and “keyword stuffed,” which doesn’t look great for your readers and may end up getting flagged as “spam.” So how can you prevent your blog from appearing spammy?

I’d strongly recommend that you curb the length of your URLs. There are a couple of different approaches to this in WordPress:

1. Hand-craft your own “Post Slug” when you are writing the post. To do so, simply type in your desired post slug into the “Post Slug” field found on the right-hand side of the “Write Post” page in the WordPress admin (you probably will have to hit the + sign to see the field). You can mirror your post’s title but drop throwaway words like “the” and “and”. You can take the first four words or so of the title as your slug. Heck, you could even write something totally different that doesn’t resemble your post title.
2. Use a WordPress plugin that will trim your post slugs down to a more manageable size, i.e. to five or six words. There are two plugins to choose from that will accomplish this: the WordPress Slug Trimmer plugin or the Automated SEO Friendly URL plugin.

For more great tips from Matt Cutts, I invite you to listen to my audio interview in MP3 format or read the full transcript. The interview is a little over 30 minutes long, and it has some invaluable advice.

Enjoy, and happy search engine optimized blogging!!!

Earlier this month I went to Las Vegas to attend (and speak at) PubCon, a conference renowned among search engine marketers. Many of my fellow SEO professionals in attendance were also bloggers. The organizers of Pubcon, including Brett Tabke and Joe Morin, had the foresight to offer the bloggers an irresistible offer, a “Bloggers Night Out“…

“So to put a twist on things, we are excited to announce that we have secured several hundred tickets to some of the best live theatre that Las Vegas has to offer. After years of having conferences in this town we’ve made a few friends and now these friends of ours at venues such as Blue Man Group, Cirque Du Soleil, MGM Grand, Treasure Island and The Wynn Las Vegas have graciously offered us tickets for our attendees in the hopes that they wouldn’t mind compiling a little review telling them what you think of their shows.”

I was really, really impressed with the generous offer. So I put my hand up. And I’m pleased to say that I was one of the lucky recipients to the Cirque du Soleil show called “Ka.” I’m a huge fan of Cirque du Soleil and had high expectations for this show. And boy it did not disappoint! I had a great seat and to take the show in. It was quite a different show from the ones I had seen in the past, such as La Nouba, Alegria, and Saltimbanco. It was a spectacle full of warriors swinging from ropes and jumping off balconies. They did the most amazing stunts on the stage as it rotated and tipped to the vertical.

It’s really forward-thinking on Cirque du Soleil’s part to agree to participate in something like this for Ka and for their other show, Mystere. Not only did I enjoy their show immensely, but I was clearly happy to blog about it to tell you what an amazing time I had (as you read in the paragraph above).

Now my challenge to you: can you emulate Cirque du Soleil’s marketing prowess by giving something of significant value away to bloggers? Reach out with this gift to bloggers in a positive, non-demanding way, and then get out of the way so those bloggers can spread the word about your quality service, product or, in this case, show.

You may have noticed (and hopefully used!) Eurekster’s Swicki widget on the right column sidebar of this blog (under the heaading labeled “Buzz Cloud”). A couple more examples of swickis can be found on my personal blog and on my daughter’s blog.

Ok, actually no I won’t blog for steak. I’m a vegetarian. But I bet plenty of other bloggers would take up such an offer.

Rajesh Setty emailed Chris Pirillo’s Braintrust list earlier this month with an email titled “Bloggers – free steaks anyone?” to promote the site AllAboutSteak.com and its sponsor Kansas City Steaks. In it, Raj wrote:

If you are a blogger and would be willing to provide some visibility – KCS wants to reward you with a gift packet (of steaks) sent to your address.

His email conjured up in my mind an image of a homeless blogger holding up a cardboard sign “Will blog for steak” — rather than the more typical “Will work for food”. (NOTE: This could make for an excellent Halloween costume for you unabashed nerds out there!)

But it also got me thinking about what is the right way to approach bloggers to get them to blog about your company/products or a client’s company/products. Something about Raj’s email got me feeling a bit uncomfortable. Thankfully though, Raj followed up later with a clarification email to the list, stating:

I should have said it better. If you receive a “gift” of steaks, all you are promising is that if you like the technology and/or steaks, you would consider providing some visibility to their “We Care” campaign.

I’m glad Raj followed up with that clarification. I think it’s critical when doing blog outreach that you don’t tie compensation to positive coverage.

WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) developed a great set of guidelines — the Ethical Blogger Contact Guidelines, which provides some guidance around how to reach out to bloggers. Some good advice there!

So… will you blog for steak?

Anyone who knows the online retailer of shoes and handbags, Zappos will know that they are renowned for their stellar customer service. But this story blew me — and many other bloggers (such as Seth Godin, Jason Kottke, and the folks at 37Signals) — away:

I Heart Zappos

In this post, Ms. LaMarr shares a poignant and heartfelt story that brought tears to my eyes. She described how she bought shoes for her mom that didn’t fit, didn’t get around to returning them, then her mom died. Out of her heartache came one ray of light: from Zappos, the online shoe store where she bought the shoes. Not only did Zappos arrange for a UPS pick-up, they sent her a bouquet of flowers along with their condolences.

Guess what? The customer that Zappos treated with such care and concern happened to be a blogger, and one with some readership. The word of Zappos good deed spread like wildfire. It’s still spreading. This was no PR stunt, it was simply a genuine act of human kindness, and it earned Zappos a ton of kudos in the blogosphere. This is inadvertent blogger outreach at its very best.

Contrast that with the slap in the face that Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza issued to one of their supposedly valued customers by inadvertently CCing the customer in his email reply to his employee:

Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.

As you can probably guess, word of the Spirit Airlines CEO’s affront got out to the blogosphere. And boy did it turn into a blogstorm. Now this post is number 3 in Google for “spirit airlines.” Classic. I don’t feel any sympathy for the airlines. Ben Baldanza literally asked for it — “Let him tell the world how bad we are.” Oh brother.

All this just goes to show, one good (or bad!) turn deserves another. Karma is alive and well in the blogosphere.

Okay, I’m not actually blogging this from Beijing. I’m blogging it from Hong Kong, as I left Beijing a couple of days ago (my favorite city in Asia, BTW, of the four I’ve visited in recent years: BJ, HK, Shanghai and Tokyo).

I’m out here to attend Ad:tech in Beijing, which wrapped up last Wednesday, and I’m off next week to DoubleClick Japan’s client conference, Insight. Mostly, I’m in the region to present about trends in US online advertising as well as to learn about the same on this side of the globe (12 hour time difference from NY; jet lag is a bitch!). But while here, I attended a session on using social networks and blogs for marketing purposes, which included two of this very blog’s contributors, Des Walsh, who moderated, and Debbie Weil, along with Jason Ge, National Sales General Manager of Sina, China’s biggest portal.

As I wasn’t really focused on blogs on this trip, most of what I learned about the phenomenon as it’s taking place in China came from this panel, but it was honestly one of the better panels at the show. Debbie’s already been blogging up a storm about her trip, and I’m sure Des will catch up shortly, too. (Deb’s made various notes, but not about the panel; she also have various video clips of it I expect she’ll upload shortly.) Meanwhile, here are some of my notes from the panel:

• China apparently already has about as many people using the Internet as the United States does, and in probably a year or so it will have more than the US and Europe combines. Moreover, a staggering number of these are active with blogs, as writers and readers. This already includes many businesses.
• Sina is one of the most popular hosting services for blogs. To that end, it employs legions of editors (one thing China is not short on is people), who, among other things, chose blog posts to feature prominently on the site. While many topics of blog posts, including business, are welcome, politics is not; to that end, Sina employs software algorithms to do much of the censorship that is a political reality in the country.
• An interesting phenomenon of blogging in China is that blog readers are comment crazy. It’s not unusual from the sound of it for individual blog posts to generate thousands of comments. Sina’s Ge related an anecdote of a furniture business blogger who offered a free sofa to each reader to post a comment at intervals of 1,000 (i.e., the 1,000th comment, to 2,000th comment, etc.). He gave away 18 couches.
• An even better Sina anecdote, some popular TV news personality who has a blog complained about the fact that Starbucks had a store inside Beijing’s historic Forbidden City (nicknamed “Forbidden Starbucks”). Sina editors linked to the post from the site’s homepage, and commenters went on to generate half a million comments! As a result, Starbucks HQ got the message and closed the store.
• Presumably one reason posts generate so many comments is that having a voice in the world is more a novelty in China than most places. One thing came through loud and clear at Ad:tech altogether: the Chinese Internet may be lagging the US market in some respects, such as the nuances of online advertising I’m paid to care about, but in terms of social media in general, it’s on fire.
• To wit, YouTube just launched Chines-language versions of its site in Hong Kong and Taiwan this week.
• It would be naive, however, to think all this adds up to unbridled openness in the Chinese market. China remains a communist country, of course. In fact, Ad:tech Beijing coincided with the 17th conference of the Chinese Communist Party. That was probably the explanation for why a variety of Internet services, including YouTube, were blocked for part of the week last week.

Hello Readers,

Good news: BusinessBlogConsulting.com is back!  Regular readers doubtless have noticed that this site has slackened in activity of late. I blame myself — life has gotten busy. That’s a lame excuse for a blogger, I know, but frankly I needed a break, and I guess the rest of our contributors followed suit.

But it’s time for a change. To that end, I’ve found a new steward for this site whom I’m sure will rise to the challenge to restore it to its earlier excellence and beyond: contributor Stephan Spencer and his partners at NetConcepts will hence force direct the content and business of this site.

Long-time readers will recognize Stephan’s name as one of our stand-out experts, whose many posts have been among the most popular with readers over the last few years. I have every confidence that he and his colleagues will take this site to a whole new level as a premier resource for marketers and bloggers looking to make the most of this unique medium for business promotion.

As for myself, I hereby pledge to resume my active contributions to this site. I’ve enjoyed my rest and am rejuvinated and inspired to return to the cause. Most of the rest of our regular experts have likewise agreed to rouse for our hiatus and rally to new deliver new insights on the topic of using blogs to maximize business performance.

Please join me in congratulating Stephen and NetConcepts on taking the reigns of the site and ushering in a new era for this blog.

It’s easy to start a blog. Not so easy to be successful. But what is success? Especially for a business blog?   Some of the measurable outcomes from business blogging include:

• Media attention
• Speaking requests
• Customer loyalty
• Inbound links to the blog
• Search engine ranking for the corporate site
• Corporate website traffic
• Leads/sales initiated
• Volume of blog traffic
• Technorati and other credible rankings
• Search engine ranking for the blog
• Increased company visibility within the industry
• Increased media coverage
• Improved customer loyalty
• Increased sales leads/revenue/new customers

And there are more depending on the purpose of the blog, whether it’s to create thought leadership, announce new products, offer SEO friendly content for a troublesome CMS or ecommerce platform, generate leads, support media relations initiatives or simply serve as a sounding board for ideas.  The true measure of success for a business blog is entirely predicated on its purpose.

Once defined, implemented and measurements are put in place, any business can create a successful blog. It’s simply a matter of time, resources and a willingness to try until “what works” reveals itself.   Here’s a more detailed exploration of this idea as well as a long list of considerations that companies need to be aware of when starting a company blog. If you’re into checklists, then be sure to read Stephan’s “Essential Checklist for Starting a Blog“.

Recently, at the BlogHer conference in Chicago, my 16-year-old daughter Chloe gave her first conference presentation on “professional blogging.” Chloe got to share her story about “making money while she sleeps,” based off of the popular virtual pets site, Neopets.

Watch some of the highlights from Chloe’s panel at BlogHer:

At 15, Chloe, like many teenagers, was looking for a way to make money. She had decided that she didn’t want to mow lawns in the neighborhood, babysit, or flip burgers–instead she hoped to turn her love for Neopets into dollars, by simply making a few, smart SEO decisions using keyword research tools like Google Suggest and WordTracker, and find trusted sources to build links for her blog. With the success of her blog, Chloe attempted to integrate Google ads, but wasn’t able to because of WordPress.com’s restrictive terms of service that forbids the use of AdSense or other third-party ads. Not long afterward, Chloe moved her entire blog to the domain neopets fanatic.com, which is currently ranking #4 for “neopets” out of 6.2 million results. (I’m so proud of her!!) Currently, her blog produces $20 to $30 per day in AdSense revenue, which totals an average of $700-900 per month for only a few hours worth of work on the site. If Chloe were working a minimum wage job at McDonalds, she’d have to work 25 to 30 hours per week to make that amount of money!

Chloe’s story should not be an unusual one. Anyone can turn SEO common “sense” into “cents,” by using the knowledge and the tools that are available.

Incentives work. Our whole economy is powered by incentives — as one of my favorite business books Freakonomics reveals.

Incentives work in the blogosphere too. Commentors will respond to incentives. Motivate your readers to comment with the following WordPress plugins (hat tip to Blogtalks.net):

• Show Top Commentators — to publicly recognize and name your top commentors on your blog
• Link Love — to motivate your commentors to post comments, because they’ll get links and PageRank from you. Most blog platforms automatically nofollow the links in comments, so that no PageRank is transferred. This WordPress plugin removes the nofollow, so that your commentors will gain an SEO benefit from their comments. Just make sure that your blog is pristinely clean of comment spam. You don’t want to inadvertently link to what Google calls “bad neighborhoods.”
• Comment Relish — to send Thank You notes to your new commentors. The plugin ensures that you don’t send regular commentors repeated thank you emails. So don’t worry, you want be inadvertently barraging your commentors with an onslaught of spam.

In case you’ve missed it, Jim Turner and I have been doing a little radio show over at Blog Talk Radio. We took a week off so I could go camping and caving, but we’re back this week!

Jim and I have been doing a lot of thinking about blogging vs writing. What makes blogging something more than content? We’ve been coaching our bloggers at Bloggers For Hire on this and educating our clients as well. I don’t think we’ve even begun to scratch the surface on the whole topic. So tomorrow we’re going to tackle that one on the next show which will be tomorrow (Wednesday the 20th) at noon PDT. Remember you can call in at (646) 478-5023 or Skype us or … Gtalk…MSN …

We’d love to have callers chime in with their opinions and if I can get a chat room set up in time … we’ll have that too! Check our Twitter feeds for updates tomorrow (Jim’s tweets— Tris’ tweets)

Catch you tomorrow!

You can listen to our past episodes in the archives section

Update: I got the web chat working! Launch the Userplane Webchat.  Jim and I will be hanging out there before, during, and maybe a little after, they show.

Technorati Tags: MediaSphere Radio, Jim Turner, Tris Hussey, pro blogging, professional blogging One By One Media, Bloggers For Hire

Sometimes, writing blog entries via a web form just doesn’t work. That’s why I’m looking forward to Mariner Software’s new blogging client called WinJournal. The WinJournal name might be familiar since Mariner Software also created MacJournal.

Currently in beta testing mode, WinJournal offers journaling, blogging and podcasting in one application. The blogging capabilities work with all popular Windows blogging software including: MovableType, TypePad, WordPress, Live Journal, Blogger and Windows Spaces. WinJournal also allows you to publish blog entries to a web server via FTP so it can be used as a web site editor as well. WinJournal can also be used to write entries stored locally.

Other options include: wiki style links, spell check, auto save, security/encryption, WYSIWYG text editor, calendar, multiple journals, labels, full screen mode and tabs. There is also a skins manager to change the look an feel of the WinJournal software. This is a good thing since the default skin under XP isn’t so good.

Other popular desktop blogging software includes: Qumana, Etco, MarsEdit, w.bloggar, BlogJet, Rocket Post 2 and Zoundry. Thomas has a short review on desktop and web based browsers at OMB.

Technorati launched a blog authority widget last month but now that Authority score is showing up next to blog search results and on a new and improved blog profile page. I’ve been paying a lot more attention to Technorati since Online Marketing Blog the top 100 Favorites list and made an appearance on the top 100 Popular blogs list recently.

Basically, the Authority score is based on the number of blogs linking to your blog within a certain period of time. I had someone ask me if they should start promoting their blog differently in order to up their “Authority” score. My recommendation is, don’t do anything that isn’t going to further the main goals of the blog. Getting on a list that can send you traffic and build credibility is nice, but if those visitors don’t respond well to your content, they’re just drive by traffic.

Okay, so I’m not a callow college-age kid anymore, I admit it. Heck, I’m not sure I was a callow youth when I was a youth, for that matter, but at this point I know I’m going to miss some of the important trends until they smack me upside the head. Even given that, though, I just don’t see why everyone’s so darn fascinated by the ceaseless stream of mundane ultratrivia produced by the fans of Twitter. A quick glimpse of their home page is all you need to see just how uninteresting the reality of people’s lives are, and yet they they are, sending one-line status updates to the world at large about their having “just cleaned the catbox”, “made a cup of tea”, “met Jax for fish dinner. Yum!” and “going to bed. l8r”.

The more I thin about it, the more I think that Twitter is actually an exhibitionists paradise at some level, but what I don’t get is why anyone would subscribe to the service and watch the information ooze along this primordial river.

Ah, but maybe I just don’t get it. So tell me, do you subscribe to Twitter? Do you post updates? Do you think anyone cares? 🙂

Okay, so technically, this isn’t a blogging related article, but since I received the original press release because I’m a blogger, I’ll stretch a point and hope that Rick won’t get too upset with me for posting it here on BBC. 🙂

One of the great challenges I see that bloggers face, particularly business bloggers, is how to respond to negative feedback. Whether it’s private email, a comment left on your blog, or even another blogger publishing a criticism of your posting on their own blog, if you’re going to blog, you need to have a relatively thick skin. More than that, though, you also need to learn how to make the proverbial lemonade out of lemons, how to turn negative feedback into something positive.

A recent example of how to do this showed up in my mailbox when I, along with many other bloggers, received a press release from BlinnPR, agency of record for KeepYouSafe.com, with the ghoulish title

The subtitle explains it a bit better: “Online Safe Deposit Boxes Help Families Avoid Ugly Legal Hassles”. Nonetheless, the entire Anna Nicole Smith story is a sad and depressing tale of greed, the perils of media, and lost souls, certainly not one upon which to hang a PR campaign in my opinion.

Bloggers generally reacted with strongly negative feedback (see Gizmodo, Paul McNamara at NetworkWorld and Ryan Block, for example), but rather than blog about it, I just sent a quick note to Steve Blinn, principal at BlinnPR:

Oh ugh. What a terrible headline and tie-in concept. Sorry, Steven, but this is not good PR in my book.

His response is a superb example of the very best of PR writing, and demonstrates exactly how you can take a negative — a thought leader in your market sending you a blunt criticism — and turn it into an apology and explanation of the benefits of the product and why it’s not as bad as it seems:

Dave,

Perhaps I did go a bit far in our “Anna Nicole” press release. It was written with tongue firmly planted in cheek and intended to be a take-off on all the tabloid coverage this story has (and continues) to receive.

In many ways, the disarray of Smith and Brown’s estates is indicative of an American culture that avoids contemplating death and its impact on family and friends.

Sadly, many of your readers (even though they’re not celebrities) are similar to Smith and Brown – they haven’t updated their will and they haven’t prepared a burial or interment plan. And, more importantly, whatever documents they do have are not readily accessible upon their death.

Given that issue, the service that KeepYouSafe.com offers, a safe and secure Online Safe Deposit Box, is a possible solution to this issue.

If I erred by writing a provocative headline and lead, I’m guilty as charged. But, the fact remains, many of your readers, just as Brown and Smith, have not updated their wills, have not written down their precise burial and interment wishes, and don’t have those document readily available to their heirs or executors.

Steven

My question to you, BBC reader, is how well do you respond effectively, thoughtfully and professionally to criticism when you find it online in any form? I think that Steven’s response is a fine model of the best approach possible and while I still don’t like the headline, he has written a sufficiently smart response that I’m willing to reconsider the possible value of KeepYouSafe.com, to give ’em a second chance as it were.

Too many articles about the legal ramifications of corporate blogs focus entirely on the negative side of blogs. This makes sense; corporate lawyers are hired with the intent of keeping the company safe and limiting risk. Marketing, extending your brand, and keeping employees and customers happy are someone else’s responsibilities.

However, As Blogging Grows, So Do Its Do’s and Don’ts, over at Law.com’s Legal Technology is a much more even-handed approach. (In fact, its do’s outnumber its don’ts about 2-to-1.)

There’s advice for public companies (do be mindful of security laws…risks associated with…making material misstatements that could manipulate the stock price and expose the company to liability for securities fraud under Rule 10b-5), companies with trade secrets, and just about anyone else.

The article can be summarized by the final quote:

The key to sticking with the “Do’s” is remembering that corporate blogging is like any other business communication that represents the company: Honesty and common sense go a long way to keeping the company (and its blog) on the right side of the law.